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Sunday, January 6, 2013

Review: Conversations with David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace
said "that no truly interesting question can be satisfactorily answered
within the formal constraints (viz. magazine-space, radio-time, public decorum)
of an interview,” which is and is not true--a Schrodinger’s-cat paradox that
plays itself here in Conversations, his fiction and his life. Wallace describes his life/artistic aims:

“[T]he standard arc
that just about everybody goes through, in that my interest in intellectual and
cerebral and clever stuff--although it’s not like I’m not interested
in that [emphasis mine]....
[T]he older I get the more what’s magical about art becomes for me the
idea of stuff that’s moving.”

This both neatly
describes what this volume manages to capture: both Wallace’s arc of life and that of his art--their
transformation yet their paradoxical uniformity. This conveys that sense that Wallace is
completely honest yet he honestly pulls aside to say that while what he says is
true, it’s not completely true, either. Another
instance of paradox occurs when Wallace began wearing bandannas in Tucson while
getting his MFA:

“ ‘because it was a hundred degrees all the time, and I would perspire so much
I would drip on the page.’ The woman he
was dating thought the bandanna was a wise move. ‘She was like a sixties lady, a Sufi
Muslim. She said there were various
chakras, and one of the big ones she called the spout hole, at the very top of
your cranium. Then I began thinking about the phrase ‘Keeping your head
together.’ It makes me feel kind of
creepy that people view it as a trademark or something--it’s more a recognition
of a weakness, which is that I’m just kind of worried that my head’s gonna
explode.”

After reading this
interview collection, one gets the sense of play present not only in his
fiction but also his life. There was no
reason to continue wearing bandannas except as a game rule, which also adds
significance to the meta-narrative of his life:
“my head’s gonna explode.”

You also witness
Wallace’s high-degree of fidelity to reality yet while observing more such
rules--a form that’s only necessary within a game construct, which becomes
persuasive within the construct but not necessarily so if removed from its
context. An example is visible in his
statement about suicide:

“All this business
about people committing suicide when they’re ‘severely depressed;’ we say, ‘Holy
cow, we must do something to stop them from killing themselves!’ That’s
wrong. Because all these people have...
by this time already killed themselves, where it really counts.... When they ‘commit suicide,’ they’re just
being orderly.”

This is genius insight
into the mind of the depressed, but it only holds true if there actually is no
way out. Who is this paradoxical man
that is David Foster Wallace?
Conversations captures the essence of Wallace in a way that no biography
or reading of his fiction could ever quite match. Imagine Wallace’s own ingeniously structured
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men transposed on his own life. The final interview after Wallace’s suicide
with those who knew him well brings a kind of closure and fuller
understanding. This book is recommended
for writers (to see previous quotes, see David Foster Wallace label) and for any reader who has enjoyed Wallace’s
work.